ABSTRACT
In Renaissance France there is a good deal less theorizing about literature than in Italy. There are a few arts poétiques, but theoretical writing never became a fashionable literary genre in itself as it did in Italy, and there is very little of the controversy involving retort and counter-retort that often went on among the Italians. The rhetorical tradition continues as strongly here as in Italy, and its terms take on the same new and sometimes ambiguous colourings, particularly key terms like ‘imitation’ and ‘invention’. But, though the new speculations about how poetry is made depend on the Italians, and the French explore the implications of ideas imported from Italy more than they advance their own, they do so cautiously. In Italy itself the literary tradition damps down the wilder reverberations of Florentine Neoplatonism; in France even those who admire Ficino most are most affected by those parts of his theology which stay closest to the centre of orthodoxy.
